Some brief thoughts on the end of FriendFeed

There was a time, around 2009 or so, when almost every post at this blog was tagged “friendfeed”. So with the announcement (which frankly I expected 5 years ago) that it is to be shut down, I guess a few words are in order.

I’m thankful to FriendFeed for facilitating many of my current online friendships. It was uniquely successful in creating communities composed of people with an interest in how to do science online, not just talk about (i.e. communicate) science online. It was justly famous for bringing together research scientists with other communities: librarians in particular, people from the “tech world”, patient advocates, educators – all under the umbrella of a common interest in “open science”. We even got a publication or two out of it.

To this day I am not sure why it worked so well. One key feature was that it allowed people to coalesce around pieces of information. In contrast to other networks it was the information, presented via a sparse, functional interface, that initially brought people together, as opposed to the user profile. There was probably also a strong element of “right people in the right place at the right time.”

It’s touching that people are name-checking me on Twitter regarding the news of the shutdown, given that no trace of my FriendFeed activity remains online. Realising that my activity was getting more and more difficult to retrieve for archiving and that bugs were never going to be fixed, I opted several years ago to delete my account. The loss of my content pains me to this day, but inaccurate public representation of my activities due to poor technical implementation pains me more.

I’ve seen a few reactions along the lines of “what is all the fuss about.” How short is our collective memory. To those people: look at Facebook, Yammer or even Twitter and ask yourself where the idea of a stream of items with associated discussion came from.

Farewell then FriendFeed, pioneer tool of the online open science community. We never did find a tool quite as good as you.